Deliverables and Tasks screenshots.

common desktop

role

UX Lead

tools

Figma, Miro,

timeline

3 Years

year

2021-2023

background

The GTP was created to consolidate legacy applications by creating a central hub for tax professionals to do their engagement work. Currently, the process is disjointed because of the reliance on various applications from the SOW phase to completion. With the GTP they have a seamless workflow throughout all phases of an engagement.

Common Desktop: is the primary section in the Global Tax Platform where tax professionals do their work; comprises over 80% of the platform's traffic. The GTP feature work was planned using the SAFe® methodology. Within the Common Desktop sections of the GTP I oversaw all of the UX work for 6-8 feature teams. The main sections are the Gather - where documents are requested for filings, Widgets, Apps, and the Deliverables section - where all of the documents and tasks are maintained.

The platform was influenced by EY Runbooks which is a phased approach for tax filings by service. The following image represents the filing from Plan to Deliver.

Plan, collect, execute, deliver phases

ux lead responsibilities

  1. Research and testing
  2. Evolution of design system
  3. Content and strategy
  4. User interviews
  5. Ideation
  6. Wireframes
  7. High fidelity mocks and prototypes
  8. Analytics using Adobe Analytics®
  9. Design thinking workshops

foundational work

Design system - breadcrumb screenshot

tax design system

During the early stages of the GTP project our UX team was responsible for creating the Tax Design System for EY. This well-implemented design system used Angular components and improved efficiency, consistency, scalability, collaboration, and user experiences to the platform. It allowed our feature dev teams to work more effectively, iterate faster, and deliver high-quality features in a more timely manner.

user flow for different roles in GTP

flow chart

In the early stages of the GTP project there were many roles added to the platform with varying permissions. To alleviate confusion for our team I created a interactive flow chart that displayed the associated pages for each role..

design thinking workshop: global filters

Problem statement: Global filtering feature for service, country, and entity is not used because of discoverability issues and clunky interactions.

Testing: The UX research lead conducted user testing with ten GTP user's so we could uncover some of the main issues with the global filtering feature.

Synthesized data: Once all of the testing results were aggregated we were able to confirm the issue stated from several business stakeholders around discoverability and confusing interactions.

Workshop: Design thinking workshop (HMW's, sketches, design above 👇 ) with the UX team to find a better solution to setting property filters in a workspace.

Workshop how might we sticky notes screenshotearly wireframes for filters

Result: A final vote was done with participants to agree upon top three designs. With many overlapping ideas it was unanimous that the interaction could be improved by triggering the filters with one click, instead of triggering a "Filter" button that triggers the global filters. Secondly, placing the filters at the top of the page instead of in a right side drawer would greatly improve the experience by making them more prominent, and more integrated with the workspace.

report subscriptions

MacBook pro with report screen

Background: Product Management wanted a way to send clients useful reports for the services they are utilizing in the GTP. Some of the sample reports include Missing Deliverables, Filing Deadlines, Completed Deliverables: Payments.

Goal: Provide KPI snapshots for client executives via email for categories like payments and deliverable tracking. This can reduce the frequency in which they need to log into the GTP.

Requirements: The technical PO provided requirements in ADO; supplemented with low-fidelity wireframes - see below.

Iterations: I worked closely with the BA and Technical PM for this to ensure we were aligned to the goals. I had two sprints to translate the requirements into a fully functional prototype. The final demonstrable prototype (using Figma) was presented to key stakeholders like PM leadership and GTP partners.

Summary: After receiving the initial requirements it made sense to leverage the existing widget framework - used to display summarized data for things like Tasks and Deliverables. Some of the recommended features and enhancements I incorporated:

  • Discoverability: Adding categories for specificity and personalization - tagging based on country and service - since this is part of our user's engagement workflow. Additionally, a search input for the library, and fast filtering pills were added.
  • Email preview: I proposed embedding an email preview into the "+Add Subscription" modal - especially useful for EY user's to see what the client email will look like.
  • Layout: Knowing the EY user's workflow and the ambiguity from having three high-level categories (KPI, Delivery Status, and Admin), I proposed a "Recommended Reports" section using attributes pulled from a user's profile. With the enhanced filtering and search it made sense to utilize a horizontal layout for faster scanning.

Deliverables and tasks

Background: The Deliverables section was intended to be the primary section for tax professionals to do their work. Eventually Tasks were integrated to show the associated tasks in a hierarchical view within the table; a calendar view was added in later PI's.

Challenges: Many of the engagement teams rely on outside workflow engines to create and update their deliverables. Some of the larger clients are reluctant to manage deliverables in the GTP, as they are accustomed to using legacy applications. Also, the updating and viewing of deliverable details is cumbersome as you have to navigate to a separate details page.

Goal: Increase adoption of the Deliverables section by creating a seamless experience through unified data sources and improved usability with viewing and editing deliverable details.

Result: We iterated on many of the features in the deliverables section, including the deliverable widgets, which were used to present the most relevant information for users based on their role (data provider, approver, reviewer, etc) in the GTP. Additionally, we were able to leverage the right modal (show in the above ☝️ screenshot) to display the deliverable details information - this allowed users to easily access deliverable details while also navigating through the deliverables in the grid with next and back actions.